Giles Alderson’s British thriller, Wolves of War, is thoroughly formulaic. Scheduled to be released on VOD and digital platforms on September 13, it takes place in Germany in 1945 during the dying days of World War II. The plot could not be more straightforward. British commandos are parachuted over Bavaria to rescue an American scientist […]
From 1933 until 1945, a momentous 12-year period encompassing the rise and fall of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime and the onset of the Holocaust, the United States admitted 225,000 European Jewish refugees. This was more than any other country, but only a fraction of the Jews in jeopardy who clamored to find a safe haven in […]
September 11, 2001 was one of those glorious September days when the air felt almost autumnal and the sun was piercingly bright. I was in my cubicle on that morning writing a story about an Israeli movie director I had interviewed at the Toronto International Film Festival, an annual event I covered for the newspaper […]
Ido and Yael Zand’s “fish-out-of-water” documentary, Gut Shabbes Vietnam, is captivatingly intriguing and appealing. Now available on the ChaiFlicks streaming platform, which specializes in Jewish and Israeli topics, it is mostly set in Ho Chi Minh City, which, until Vietnam’s unification in 1975, was known as Saigon. The film opens in 2006 in Jerusalem as […]
The displacement of some 700,000 Palestinians from their homes in what is now Israel, an event known as the nakba, has been a topic of international concern for more than seven decades now. During and after this upheaval, close to 850,000 Jews in the Arab world and Iran left or were compelled to leave their homes. […]
Carl Laemmle was truly one of the pioneers of the Hollywood movie industry. He founded and managed Universal Studios, which would be the biggest film producer in the United States. And he launched the careers of, among others, the director John Ford and the actress Mary Pickford. This German Jewish immigrant is profiled in James […]
Netflix’s new, mildly entertaining eight-part series, Mo, comically focuses on the trials and tribulations of a displaced Palestinian refugee family in Texas. It could very well be the first American television production exclusively about Palestinian migrants in the United States. The American standup comedian Mohammed Amer plays the central character, Mohammed Najjar, who lives in Houston […]
Less than three weeks after Israel and Turkey officially restored full diplomatic relations, following an acrimonious break of four years, a Turkish naval vessel docked in Haifa in an unmistakable sign that the normalization process has begun in earnest. The Kemalreis, a frigate, arrived in Haifa on September 3 to participate in a NATO exercise alongside […]
Fabian Nury’s Paris Police 1900 is set against the backdrop of the sensational Dreyfus affair, which split France down the middle in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A moody police procedural and a taut political drama, it will be available in Canada and the United States on the MHz Choice streaming platform on September 20. […]
When he died on August 30 at the age of 91, Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, left an indelible legacy as a bold and courageous visionary who upended the stultifying political and economic status quo in his country. Through his innovative policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring), he gradually dismantled […]